Problem :
I am looking for this struct messages_sdd_t and I need to search through a lot of *.c files to find it. However, I can’t seen to find a match as I want to exclude all the words ‘struct’ and ‘messages_sdd_t’. As I want to search on this only ‘struct messages_sdd_t’ The reason for this is, as struct is used many times and I keep getting pages or search results.
I have been doing this without success:
find . -type f -name '*.c' | xargs grep 'struct messages_sdd_t'
and this
find . -type f -name '*.c' | xargs egrep -w 'struct|messages_sdd_t'
Many thanks for any suggestions,
Solution :
Use ack:
ack “struct messages_sdd_t” *.c
It is recoursive by default and it is a lot faster than grep (according to my observation) when searching trough a directory containing tons of source code.
If you don’t want to use ack, grep should be fine too:
grep -r “struct messages_sdd_t” *.c
find . -type f -name '*.c' -exec grep 'structs+messages_sdd_t' {} ;
Or if you only care about the filename:
find . -type f -name '*.c' -exec grep -q 'structs+messages_sdd_t' {} ; -print
grep -R --include='*.c' 'struct messages_sdd_t' .
This will search recursively and use grep itself to pick only .c files.
Consider adding -H to always write the file name with the line match.